The Ultimate Bad Day on Wall Street

Most Americans regard acts of political violence within US borders as aberrations – occasional deeds by the fringe few who exist in all places and times. How frequent must something be before the term “aberration” is simply wrong? People will differ in their answers to that, but ideologues willing to use violence as a tool either to obtain or retain power are not always fringe or few. Among them in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were numerous anarchists (mostly anarcho-communists) who openly promoted or defended violence – not civil disobedience ala Gandhi (“the means are the ends”) or labor strikes but lethal attacks. In concert with their similarly minded colleagues around the world they took the position that the established authorities enforce their control with violence so it was legitimate to use violence in turn against them and their supporters.

Like European counterparts who blew up Czar Alexander II and assassinated French President Carnot, anarchists in the US sometimes targeted individuals. There were, as examples, the attempted assassination of Henry Frick by Alexander Berkman (Emma Goldman’s confidante), the attempt on JP Morgan Jr. (he was shot twice) at his home by Erich Muenter (a former instructor at Harvard), and the successful assassination of President McKinley by self-described anarchist Leon Czolgolz. Czolgolz explained, “I shot the President because I thought it would help the working people, and for the sake of the common people.”

Others targeted industrial and government sites with dynamite. Bombings in the 1890s and 1900s numbered in the hundreds. These acts were encouraged by people such as Johann Most who published Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Handbook of Instruction Regarding the Use and Manufacture of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Arsons, Poisons, etc. In 1908 The New York Times noted a rate of about one bomb per month in New York City. A 1910 bomb at The Los Angeles Times killed 21. A bomb at the Preparedness parade in San Francisco in 1916 killed 10. Police tried to connect the San Francisco bombing to Berkman who was in town with Emma Goldman editing his “revolutionary labor weekly” titled Blast, but were unable to do so. On May Day 1919, 30 letter bombs were sent to business and political leaders; the one casualty was Senator Hardwick’s maid who had her hands blown off. On the 2^nd of June 1919 bombs went off simultaneously in 7 Eastern cities: one of them at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. This was the domestic backdrop of the Palmer raids during the 1919 Red Scare that ran roughshod over Constitutional protections. The deadliest bombing of the era was yet to come.

On the morning of September 16, 1920, a horse drawn red wagon parked in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Company on the corner of Wall Street and Broad in lower Manhattan. The wagon was packed with dynamite wrapped in window counterweights for shrapnel. It exploded at 12:01 PM, ideally timed for the lunch crowd. The detonation killed 38 people and wounded 143 more – many horrifically – while shattering windows for blocks. To this day damage to the exterior wall of the Morgan building is visible; inside the Morgan bank there was one death (a messenger boy) and several injuries from flying glass. Nearly all the casualties on the street were ordinary people: secretaries, chauffeurs, tradesmen, salespeople, pushcart vendors, etc. A poorly coordinated investigation by the Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the FBI) and the NYPD followed numerous leads and entailed several arrests but none of those arrested were charged in the end.

The public was so horrified that many in the socialist and anarchist press (including Eugene Debs) insisted the explosion was just an accident: the unplanned explosion of a wagon destined for a construction site. They noted that eyewitnesses previously had seen a red DuPont truck or wagon in the area. Construction dynamite is not transported packed in shrapnel, however, so this was not a plausible hypothesis on the face of it; the DuPont truck in question was located and was found to have been carrying paint. As in the case of most bombings of the era, no one claimed credit though some defended it. The case is formally unsolved to this day.

An excellent account of the era in general and the Wall Street bombing in particular is The Day Wall Street Exploded by Beverly Gage, who teaches history at Yale. She provides background on the prominent anarchists and on their varying philosophies about violence. She also introduces us to the industrialists and bankers whom they targeted and to the major figures in local, state, and national governments who targeted them. She provides a solid well-balanced account free of modern polemics – though it recounts historical polemics from all sides.

So, who did plant the Wall Street bomb? Authorities might have come close to a solution before getting distracted by wrongheaded ideas. The 1920/21 investigation mixed fumbling forensics and misguided conspiracy theories (including a supposed Soviet connection) with some surprisingly solid police grunt work. The horse (which was shredded) was newly shod with an unusual amount of caulking. The police found the farrier who did the work; the job was an anonymous cash transaction with someone the farrier described simply as (like himself) Italian. Among the many groups and people investigated by the authorities were the Galleanisti in Paterson NJ, followers of Luigi Galleani, publisher of the Italian language Cronica Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle). Galleani was deported in 1919 due to suspicion of involvement in earlier bombings (including one that killed 10 at a police station), but his followers continued to meet. They issued a flyer threatening a dynamite campaign: “And deport us! We will dynamite you!” Among the Galleanisti were Sacco and Vanzetti who were arrested on murder charges in connection with a robbery in Braintree Massachusetts on September 11, 1920. (The case was circumstantial, but not as flimsy as is sometimes represented – at least as co-conspirators if not as perpetrators; a conviction might be hard to obtain today on the same evidence but an indictment would be easy.) In 1991 historian Paul Avrich concluded that Mario Buda (Galleanist, close friend of Sacco and Vanzetti, and implicated in the June 2 bombings) was the probable bomber and that his motive was retaliation for the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti five days earlier. A century after the event this can’t be proven but Avrich makes a compelling case.

After 1920 anarchist violence faded, replaced to some degree by enthusiasm for the new Soviet state, which discouraged individual terrorism. (Emma Goldman, however, after two years in Russia became an anti-communist though she remained an anarchist.) Did the shootings and bombings achieve their political goals? Did they accomplish anything? The answer is pretty clearly no. Terror can work in an out-and-out civil war (e.g. Bolshevists in Russia) or by unrestrained militias (e.g. Mussolini’s Black Shirts) of a revolutionary political party during extreme national turmoil, but in generally stable polities, democratic or otherwise, it only brings public sympathy for the targets and hostility toward the perpetrators. (Nietzsche: “It is only because they [monarchs] have been shot at that they once again sit securely on their thrones.”) We saw much the same response after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. One may hope that no one soon, despite these past failures, tests the tactic yet again.